Emergent Literacy Is Emerging Knowledge of Written, Not Oral, Language

Although some may consider children’s developing orallanguage as key to literacy development, the authorargues that it is children’s development of knowledge ofwritten language that is important. This has significantimplications for home and school environments andactivities.

Emergent Literacy Is EmergingKnowledge of Written,Not Oral, Language

Victoria Purcell-Gates

There once was a brave knight and a beautiful lady. They went ona trip, a dangerous trip! They saw a little castle in the distance.They went to it. A mean, mean, mean hunter was following them,through the bushes at the entrance of the little castle. As hecreeped out of the bushes, he thought what to do. As the draw-bridge was opened, they could easily get in.

This remarkable piece of language was produced by a five-year-old kinder-garten girl. She was not reading these sentences from a book, nor was shetelling me a story. What she was doing was pretending to read orally from awordless picture book. In the process, she was also revealing a type of lan-guage knowledge that she possessed, revealing linguistic competencethrough linguistic performance embedded in a congruent pragmatic con-text. I had asked her to pretend to read to a doll—she was the mommy, andthe doll was her little girl. This little girl did not talk like this, nor did anyof the other thirty-nine children in this particular research sample (Purcell-Gates, 1988). I know this because I compared the way they used languagewhen pretend-reading to the way they used language when telling me a per-sonal narrative about an important event (like their birthday parties).

The language these children used when they pretended to read was,according to my linguistic analysis, the language of storybooks. The fact thatit was rendered orally did not make it oral language. Rather, it was (pretend)written language read aloud. As such, I contend, it is an important facet of the

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, no. 92, Summer 2001 © Jossey-Bass, A Publishing Unit ofJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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8 FAMILY ENVIRONMENTS AND YOUNG CHILDREN’S EMERGING LITERACY SKILLS

construct many refer to as emergent literacy. The construct of literacy implieswritten texts, or written language; therefore, according to the thesis I hope toadvance in this chapter, emerging literacy needs to be concerned with theemerging conceptual and procedural knowledge of written language, includ-ing the reading and writing of that language. Any other concerns, such ashome environments and preschool experiences, should be relevant to thestudy of emergent literacy only to the degree to which they contextualize, pro-mote, or hinder the development of written language knowledge.

Further, concerns with oral language proficiency within the inquiryframe of emergent literacy should be approached from the written languageproficiency perspective. Oral language, in and of itself, is not directly rele-vant to the study of emergent literacy, I contend. Rather, its appropriateinclusion as a piece of emergent literacy research is as an artifact of the waysin which emerging knowledge of written language has influenced oral lan-guage. This thesis only makes sense if one allows that oral language, includ-ing its vocabulary, syntax, and reference conventions, differs in significantways from written language and its vocabulary, syntax, and reference con-ventions as well as its pragmatic constraints. I will develop this point in thischapter.

Models of Emergent Literacy

One of the motivations for this chapter and this thesis is the state of the fieldof emergent literacy. Emergent literacy is defined by different researchers asany combination of the following: phonemic awareness, the alphabeticalprinciple, concepts of print, purposes for reading and writing, print as asemiotic system, concept of story, Piagetian stages, mother-child oral inter-actions around book reading, vocabulary development, oral language devel-opment writ large, invented spelling, symbol development, literacy play,storybook reading styles, and literacy as social or cultural practice.

To simplify and clarify the construct of emergent literacy, Sénéchal,LeFevre, Colton, and Smith (1999) argue for taking language out of the mix.To do this they, of necessity, limit their definition of literacy to conceptualand procedural knowledge about print, such as letter knowledge, spelling,reading words, and so on. I offer an alternative view to their alternative viewof the emergent literacy construct, although I acknowledge the difficultythey cite with the construct of language writ large as it is defined throughinvocation and application in the broad field of emergent literacy research.I do not think that one can take language out of the construct of emergentliteracy any more than one could restrict the study of oral language devel-opment to the study of perception and pronunciation of sounds and ignoresyntax, vocabulary, and pragmatics. Emergent literacy is the developmentof the ability to read and write written texts, and written texts are consti-tuted by written language. Thus it makes no sense to take the language outof the emergent part of literacy.

9EMERGENT LITERACY IS EMERGING KNOWLEDGE OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

The model I am suggesting places written language, at all levels ofspecificity, at the center of the emergent literacy construct and has beenexplicated elsewhere (Purcell-Gates, 1986, 1995, 1996). This model positsthat young children learn the underlying concepts of the reading and writ-ing processes as they experience written language in use in their lives. Fig-ure 1.1 displays the ways in which the different levels of written languageknowledge relate to each other and highlights the constraints imposed bysociocultural contexts on uses of print.

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to addressing the unfortunateconfusion between language, oral language, and written language in the lit-erature and research on emergent literacy. Thus I will address elements ofthe middle circle in Figure 1.1: the nature and forms of written language.

Historical Assumption of Oral Language as the Base for Reading

Ever since Walter Loban (1963) published his twelve-year developmentalstudy showing a strong association between oral language ability and read-ing achievement, the literacy community has held as one of its most basicassumptions that literacy development rests on an oral language base. Overthe years, we have come to view reading and writing as language activities,and as such, we have essentially viewed the association between learners’oral language and their subsequent ability to read and write as facilitative

CULTURAL VIEW AND FUNCTION

S

OF WRITTEN LANGUAGE

NATURES AND FORM

SPR

INT/SPEECH

R

ELATIONSHIPS

O

FW

RITTEN LANGUAGE

Figure 1.1. Dimensions of Written Language Knowledge as Defined andConstrained by Experience with Print and by Sociocultural Context

Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy byVictoria Purcell-Gates, p. 47. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1995 bythe President and Fellows of Harvard College.


and almost causal. Researchers and theorists have centered their effortsaround examining this relation, documenting it, and describing its devel-opment and its social contexts (for example, Cazden, 1972; Gee, 1989;Labov, 1973; Loban, 1963; Snow, 1991).

Language Variation and Social Context: There Is No “Average” Oral Language

To begin my argument that emergent language knowledge is emergentknowledge of written language, not oral, I start with the deconstruction ofthe notion of language. Most of us now understand that any one languageis composed of regional variations, or dialects, marked most significantly bydifferences in pronunciation and vocabulary. In addition to regional dialects,though, sociolinguists have been documenting for years the ways in whichintralanguage, or dialect, variations are also related to social contexts. Thus,given experience with particular social contexts, we can predict and recog-nize the form of language we are likely to encounter when, for example, weattend a lecture, go to the grocery store, visit our doctor, testify in court, orattend a worship service. The identifying language features for differentsocial contexts include phonology (the sounds of our words and sentences),word choice (lexis), syntax, topic, and such paralinguistic features as speedand rhythm of speech (Hymes, 1974; Stubbs, 1983).

The social context factors that appear to influence language use includepower relations between speaker and listener, emotional, physical, or socialdistance between speaker and listener, function of the language used, anddiscourse community style. Thus the same speaker will use a different lan-guage variant (termed variously as registers, sociolects, or genres) when giv-ing a lecture to a large class, giving a lecture at a small seminar, conversingwith a close friend on the street, conversing with that same friend on thetelephone, speaking to a bank teller, and so on.

From what has already been stated, it seems clear that labeling a formof speech as oral is unnecessarily broad if we wish to point out or highlightany of the linguistic features just listed. Of course, if we merely wish to dis-tinguish the language by mode, then the use of the term oral works well toindicate that the mode is aural and not written. We could also simply usethe term speech to indicate the same.

I suggest, however, that when the term oral language is used in mostdiscussions of the relation between oral language and emergent literacydevelopment, what is being thought of are those very features that differ inuse across social situations: phonology, word choice, topic, and syntax. Theproblem with this is that, as we now know, when it comes to actual speech,no one of us speaks a form of language decontextualized from the social sit-uation in which it is used. In other words, it is impossible to characterizeone’s speech, or oral language, without specifying its purpose, function,audience, and genre conventions (Bakhtin, 1981; Christie, 1987; Halliday


and Hasan, 1985; Stubbs, 1983). There is no “average” speech (averagedacross social contexts) for any of us that can be labeled and used to charac-terize, with any sort of linguistic specificity, “how we talk.”

Language variation in a literate society also extends to language that iswritten down. As with oral language, many variations exist within the broadcategory of written language, variations reflecting differing social situationsmediated by print. And, again as with oral language, these variations reflectsuch factors as power and social relationship between writer and reader;emotional, physical, or social distance between writer and reader; and func-tion served by the written language. In the case of written language, writ-ten genres (socially determined written language variants) (Christie, 1987)are marked by such linguistic features as word choice, syntax, topic, anddiscourse community style. Thus one can identify different patterns of thesefeatures across different text genres, such as personal letters, mortgages,news stories, editorials, sports stories, encyclopedias, science reports,romance fiction, mystery fiction, how-to manuals, and so on.

Differences Between Oral and Written Language

Although language variation in response to varying social contexts is therule for all oral and written language use, it is also true that language variesin linguistically identifiable ways by mode. That is, it is possible to identifylinguistic markers for language in use that indicate whether the languagewas produced to serve primarily oral or primarily written functions. Thisfeature variation does not arise from a need to mark the mode of the lan-guage (aural or written); rather, it arises because language functions toaccomplish different tasks for different purposes, and these socially relatedconstraints shape language forms in significant ways.

Thus we write language down if we need to communicate with someonewho is not physically present at the moment—and the language producedreflects this. We use writing to make a thought permanent because print con-tinues to exist after we produce it, unlike oral speech. We write languagedown to serve legal and administrative functions because, in this literate soci-ety, print carries much more authority than speech. The linguistic markersthat tend to distinguish oral from written language include word choice andvariety, syntax, and reference conventions (Chafe and Danielewicz, 1986).

Vocabulary. Vocabulary is a favorite language measure for emergentliteracy researchers (Crain-Thoreson and Dale, 1992; Payne, Whitehurst,and Angell, 1994; Sénéchal, Thomas, and Monker, 1995; Snow and others,1991; see also Chapter Two of this volume). The preferred assessment is thePeabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), which is a norm-referenced testof receptive vocabulary. Repeatedly, correlation studies have shown a strongassociation between scores on the PPVT and scores on reading assessmentmeasures. With this in mind, consider the findings of linguists who studyoral and written language differences.


The vocabulary chosen for written language includes words that mostusers of the language would agree belong in books or other print contextsrather than in speech. These vocabulary items are identified as lexicalchoices between words with the same meaning, with the more “common”word (for example, use, show, pay attention to) being rejected by the writerin favor of a more “literary” one (for example, employ, state, heed). Otherlinguists refer to these word types as “rare words” or “sophisticated words”(Weizman, 1996). These labels reflect the fact that these literary words areused less frequently overall than their more commonly used counterparts,and linguistic analyses document that when they are used, they tend toappear in print rather than speech.

Written texts also tend to reflect a greater variety of vocabulary, perhapsbecause of the greater time for choosing wording afforded by writing ascompared with speaking (Chafe and Danielewicz, 1986). Variety of worduse can be measured by type/token ratios, with the number of differentwords in a sample divided by the total number of words in the sample.Comparing a formal speaking situation—formal lectures—with a formalwriting situation—written essays—Chafe and Danielewicz found that thelectures had a type/token ratio of words of .19, as compared with essays,which had a ratio of .24. Even the more informal written texts of letters hada type/token ratio of words of .22, slightly higher than the formal spokentext of lectures.

Syntax. Syntax is harder to measure reliably than vocabulary, but theassumption of an association between speaking with an “elaborated” syn-tax (as opposed to a “restricted” one) and reading achievement has beenwith us since Bernstein’s claim (1960) to this effect regarding working-classchildren in Britain. I suggest that much of the emergent literacy researchthat focuses on the oral language of parents and of parent-child interactionsat least partially emanates from this assumption. With this in mind, con-sider the linguistic differences in syntax between oral and written language.

The syntax found in written texts, as compared with oral texts, is moreembedded and often transformed. Embeddedness is accomplished with suchconstructions as dependent clauses, appositives, nominalizations, adjectiveand adverbial clauses, and attributive adjectives. Many more written sen-tences than oral ones are left-branching in that the sentence does not beginwith the subject and continue to the verb but, rather, begins with an adver-bial clause or other type of modifier clause that the reader must hold inmemory before encountering the subject—for example, “Down through theforest in silent rushes, the river ran along its deadly course.” Transforma-tions more typical of written text than oral language also appear in sen-tences at the clausal and lexical levels. For instance, the preceding writtenexample can be made even more “written” (that is, more prototypically writ-ten as judged by “native readers”) by inverting the subject and verb: “Downthrough the forest in silent rushes ran the river along its deadly course.”These types of transformations are typically found in reported dialogue,


even in text written for very young children—for example, “‘Begone!’ saidthe queen.” Here not only are the subject and verb inverted, but the object(Begone) and the verb (said) are also inverted.

Owing to the greater amount of composing time for writing, differentprocessing demands for aural and written input, and style differences, oralsyntax is much more fragmented, with clauses and phrases more “strungtogether” than embedded (Chafe and Danielewicz, 1986). This results inwhat Bernstein (1960) referred to as the “restricted” (as opposed to “elabo-rate”) nature of speech. Not even counting the typical disfluencies (falsestarts, repetitions, abandoned intonation units), speakers even in the mostformal settings will not produce the type of syntactical constructions theywould if they were writing. Those who have heard public speakers who readtheir papers rather than speak their presentations know immediately thatthey are listening to written, not oral, language. Although intonation is oneof the markers, the written syntactical constructions also significantly con-tribute to this recognition (and make the presentation much more difficultto follow and comprehend by ear).

Reference Use. Emergent literacy researchers have also focused on theuse of decontextualized oral language (Snow, 1983, 1991; Snow and others,1991). Because written language requires the use of decontextualized lan-guage, the reasoning goes, the ability to use oral language in a decontextu-alized way is a predictor of later reading achievement. However, again theresearch on differences between oral and written language informs thisissue.

The use of decontextualized language—decontextualized from theimmediate and shared physical context of the speaker and listener or writerand reader—is much more frequent in written than oral language. In fact,by virtue of the physical and temporal space between writer and reader,written language is inherently characterized by decontextualized language(an exception, perhaps, being notes written between two friends in the sameclassroom commenting on an ongoing, present event). In oral language,topic and situation dictate the degree to which decontextualized languageis needed and appropriate (Snow, 1983, 1991). Casual conversation reliesto a great degree on paralinguistic means and dialogic (speaker and listener)mediation of meaning. Gestures, facial expressions, and intonation are allparalinguistic factors that are appropriate to oral language. They are, how-ever, impossible in written language. Even when pictures are used to clar-ify written text, the meaning must remain in the linguistic (written) text.

The appropriate reference is used to make decontextualized languagecomprehensible to the reader. What can be accomplished semanticallythrough gestures, facial expressions, and intonation in oral communicativeevents must be accomplished in writing with explicit language and appro-priate endophoric referencing. Exophoric references are references to mean-ing outside of the text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976) and are not allowed inwriting, which requires endophoric, or within-text, references (Rubin, 1978).


One type of exophoric reference that is often misused by beginning writersare pointers, or deictics, such as this or that, indicating that an understand-ing of this characteristic of written language does not develop along with orallanguage competence but, rather, is specific to the nature of written text.

A Continuum of Social Constraints. Linguistic markers of differ-ences between oral and written language occur most frequently when thesocial context for the language use is maximally different, such as oralconversations and written essays. When they are more alike—such as aformal speech and a written essay—the differences between literary andcolloquial word choice are smaller. However, to use an example cited ear-lier, unless a formal speech is actually a reading of a written essay, one ismore likely to find fewer “rare words” in the speech than in the essay,less embedded syntax in the speech than in the essay, and moreexophoric references reflecting the shared physical context in the speechthan in the essay.

The Language-Literacy Relation. The foregoing discussion is offeredas support for my thesis that although young children’s developing, oremerging, language knowledge is central to emergent literacy, it is not lan-guage knowledge writ large. The incredible variation of language inresponse to sociocultural contexts, as well as very basic differences betweenoral and written language, render this global construct of language prob-lematic. At the very least, it is not helpful in the scientific sense given theresulting loss of specificity of operative linguistic factors like vocabulary,syntax, and the degree to which language is formed to account for neededdegrees of decontextualization. The emerging language and literacy ofyoung children must be the developing knowledge of the forms of writtenlanguage, not oral. Further, we are now increasingly acknowledging varia-tion across written genres and beginning to demand that measures of youngchildren’s written language knowledge be made more specific than just writ-ten language writ large (Duke, 2000; Duke and Kays, 1998; Pappas, 1991;Purcell-Gates and Duke, 1999).

Evidence of Developing Written Language Knowledge

In the last two decades several studies have documented the emergence ofwritten language knowledge among young children. Sulzby (1985) mappeda developmental move made by three- to six-year-old children in the lan-guage they used to “read” favorite storybooks. They moved from the use oflanguage more appropriate to “oral” language (that is, language thatassumes a shared physical context) to language more appropriate to “writ-ten” language (that is, language that does not assume a shared physical con-text and thus is more explicit and decontextualized). Note that their pretendreadings were oral in the sense that they were produced aloud, aurally. How-ever, the language used was not equally oral in the more pragmatic, socio-contextual sense of register or genre. Thus for the first time in the emergent


literacy field, researchers were differentiating sociocontextually determinedregisters in language produced aurally—and considered therefore as“oral”—and selecting out those registers tied experientially and pragmati-cally to print as “written” language knowledge and ability (Pappas andBrown, 1988).

Sulzby’s task (1985) involved young children producing renderings ofwritten narrative text that had been repeatedly read to them (that is, theywere pretending to read). Pappas (1991) did the same with written exposi-tion, recording the pretend readings young children did after hearing thetext repeatedly read to them. Thus both Sulzby and Pappas could begin totrace the development of this written language knowledge over time andafter experience with written text. However, with tasks such as these, thealternative explanation that children were simply getting better at repeatingoft-heard sentences cannot be completely discounted. I began a series ofstudies using a task designed to avoid this interpretation.

Desiring to explore the hypothesis that young children, through hearingwritten language read to them, learn a linguistic register that is specific to thesocial context in which it is used (that is, storybooks and storybook reading),I designed a task that would require young children to compose this registerwithout ever having heard a particular text. The theory and rationale for thiswere well grounded in psycholinguistic and language acquisition research, inwhich language production is taken as evidence of underlying rule-governedlinguistic knowledge (Slobin and Welsh, 1971). I asked preliterate kinder-gartners to apply their (hypothesized) knowledge of syntactical, lexical, andreferential features (Chafe, 1982) more typical of written than oral languageto a new textual situation, thus testing the actual existence of this knowledge.The language sample with which this chapter begins comes from this study.

I randomly selected well-read-to kindergarten children (see Purcell-Gates, 1988, for details of procedures) and asked them to perform two tasks:to tell me about a recent birthday party (or other significant event if the child’sfamily did not celebrate birthdays or if the child could not remember theparty) and to pretend to read a story told by pictures in a wordless storybookand to make it sound like a book story. Although personal narratives are notthe same language forms as fictional narratives, the pragmatic influence onlanguage form makes it impossible to find completely parallel oral and writ-ten genres. The requested personal narrative was chosen to maximally callforth language features that reflect real distance between speaker and listener.

The first task was intended to elicit an oral narrative—decontextualizedin the sense that its topic was something not presently happening in theshared context of researcher and child (Snow, 1983; 1991). The second taskwas designed to elicit a written narrative (albeit delivered orally)—alsodecontextualized but assumed, or pretended, to be written. Thus in addi-tion to testing the hypothesis that these well-read-to children possessedknowledge of a written narrative register, I could also test the counterhy-pothesis that they could produce this language orally because they normally


spoke this way when recounting narratives. I could test this by looking forreal differences in the frequency of occurrences of those features consideredas markers of written text, as opposed to oral, between the two samples pro-duced by each child. I was looking for linguistic evidence that these youngchildren spoke narratives differently than they “read” them.

The data from this study, with its within-subject analysis, strongly con-firmed that these children differentiated oral and written narrative languagewithin their overall language knowledge and could produce each differentregister given the appropriate social context (that is, a request to tell abouta past event and a request to pretend-read a story from a book to adoll/child). My analysis of the data for this study (Purcell-Gates, 1988, 1991,1992) revealed that these children did not use the same linguistic registerto speak their oral narratives as they did when they pretended to read.

Their written narrative registers were distinguished from their oral nar-rative registers in the following ways: they were syntactically more inte-grated; they were lexically more literary and varied; they were lexically andsyntactically more involving through the use of high-image verbs, image-producing adverbials, and attributive adjectives; and they were more decon-textualized through appropriate endophoric reference use. In other words,these five-year-olds, when placed in a typically oral language social contextof telling someone about a past event, did not talk in the same way as theydid when they were placed in a typical written language social context ofreading aloud from a book. The language used for each was different in itsvocabulary, syntax, and degree of decontextualization—all linguistic factorsdeemed relevant to emerging literacy and early reading success.

Home Environment and Learning the Features of Written Language

It makes sense to believe that this knowledge of written language comesfrom being read to, and parents have been told to read to their childrenfor years. Unfortunately, there has been little research that shows a causalrelation between reading to young children and their written languageknowledge. It would be unethical to design a good experiment with ran-dom assignment to condition to test this theory. However, support for itcomes from data that I have collected over the years with the same pretend-read task. This task has been used in three other studies involv-ing exclusively children of low socioeconomic status (SES), most of whomwere not extensively read to in their homes (Purcell-Gates and Dahl, 1991;Dahl and Freppon, 1995; Purcell-Gates, 1996). The results of all of thesestudies show clearly that the written register knowledge of the low-SESchildren at the start of kindergarten is almost nonexistent as comparedwith that of the well-read-to children at the start of kindergarten.

Further support for this thesis came from a participant observation studyof twenty-four low-SES children in their homes, where all uses of print were


documented and the four- to six-year-old children in the homes were given thepretend-reading task, among others, designed to measure emergent literacyknowledge (Purcell-Gates, 1996). In this group of children a significant cor-relation was found between being read to and scores on this task, specifyingthe source of this knowledge beyond the demographic variable of SES.

Oral Language to Written Language or Written to Oral?

Many researchers point to the ability to use more “elaborated” languagein oral settings as an important precursor of reading achievement. Theycite the use of rare words, complex syntax, and decontextualized languagein the speech of successful children. How does this relate to the thesisbeing developed here and to the evidence for that thesis?

It is true, in the data just presented, that the oral personal narratives ofthe well-read-to children were also highly effective as examples of oraldecontextualized language ability (Snow, 1983; 1991). Following is a sam-ple of the oral personal narrative language used by the same child whosepretend-reading language begins this chapter:

I got a rainbow heart. And so did my friend, my best friend at the party. Myfriend Kee, who’s actually the same birthday. And then I know another per-son with a June 1st birthday, but he’s a boy. And his name is Brandon. Andhe’s just down the street. And then after my party, we had like a little familyparty, and we went to the San Francisco Zoo.

There can be no doubt that oral language skill is related to written lan-guage knowledge. However, I argue that the direction of the effect is fromwritten to oral, rather than the other way around. Many parents of youngchildren will report anecdotally their amusement with the vocabulary and“ways of saying” that appear in the speech of their children from the booksthe parents have read to them.

In one of the few empirical studies to document evidence in support ofthe theory that written language knowledge influences oral language per-formance, Chomsky (1972) investigated the acquisition of complex syn-tactical structures by children ages six to ten and documented that exposureto written text, with its more complex syntactical structures, played a roleindependent of IQ in influencing linguistic (oral) stage. For further docu-mentation in support of this written-to-oral effect, I suggest that a system-atic analysis of the PPVT items would reveal that those items or words thatallow for the maximum variation in scores at the top end would be consid-ered more “written,” that is, rare. This would suggest that children whoscore in the upper ranges of this test have learned these words through theinfluence on their own vocabulary, as well as that of their parents, of writ-ten text from which those rare words come. This would help explain the


high correlation and ultimate confounding of SES (highly determined byparental education level) and score on the PPVT.

More support for this thesis of a written-to-oral effect comes from datagenerated from a reanalysis of data from the Purcell-Gates (1988), Purcell-Gates and Dahl (1991), and Dahl and Freppon (1995) studies, in which thepretend-reading task was used (Purcell-Gates, McIntyre, and Freppon,1995). This reanalysis compared the written language feature use of thewell-read-to kindergartners in the earliest study with that of the less-well-read-to low-SES kindergartners in the following two studies. The languagefeatures that were used in the analyses of the pretend-reading task (that is,those used more frequently in written than in oral language) are participles,attributive adjectives, conjoined phrases, series, sequences of prepositionalphrases, complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, -ly adverbs,literacy words and phrases, literary word order, direct quotes, sound effects,and endophoric references.

The data show that at the beginning of kindergarten, the low-SES chil-dren did not differ much from the well-read-to children in the degree towhich they used a few features of written language in their oral renderingsbut differed significantly in how many of these features they used that wouldmake the oral language more specific and decontextualized. When pretend-ing to read, though, they differed a great deal in how many written languagefeatures they used as well as the degree to which they used each one, indi-cating almost no knowledge or experience with written storybook language.

When the low-SES children were assessed on this measure at the end offirst grade, after two years of being read to in school, their scores revealed thattheir use of written language features significantly increased in regard to boththe degree to which they used each feature and the number of features theyused in their pretend readings. Their scores on both of these dimensions werestatistically no different from those of the well-read-to children (who were onlyassessed at the beginning of kindergarten). Further, their use of written lan-guage features in their oral recounts increased significantly in regard to thenumber of different written language features they used and slightly in regardto the degree they used each one.

This analysis suggests that the low-SES children learned written languagefeatures from being read to in school (as well as from learning to read) andthat some of that knowledge also affected their ability to produce oral lan-guage that was more decontextualized than before (when presented with atask that called for more decontextualized oral language—telling me abouttheir birthdays).

Written Language—the Language in Emergent Literacy

The argument just presented is not meant to be taken as a claim that oral andwritten language exist in separate spheres or that they are different languages,


nor is it meant to deny the primary status of oral language. Clearly, an under-lying language disability stemming from neurological compromise or severeenvironmental deprivation would affect the ultimate development of writtenlanguage knowledge—as described herein—as well as oral. Rather, my desireis to develop an argument for retaining language as key to emergent literacyknowledge but making the nature of that variable written rather than oral.

Implications for Policy, Research, and Practice

Retaining language—written language—as an important variable of emer-gent literacy knowledge is responsive to the fact that this knowledge beginsearly, before formal literacy instruction and along with print-based concepts,for those children who have experienced its use. It is thus part of the pack-age of emerging knowledge about reading and writing written discourse.

As family literacy policy and programs seek to find ways to help par-ents incorporate activities into their homes that will help prepare their chil-dren for learning to read and write, experiences with written language inthe home environment may be critical for emergent literacy knowledge. Notonly is children’s language knowledge expanded when they are read to, buttheir conceptual grasp of the symbolic nature of print, their growing under-standing of the alphabetical principle, and their knowledge of crucial con-cepts of print are all affected by the degree to which people in their homesread and write and the types of texts they read and write (Purcell-Gates,1996). With the focus on written language experiences, suggestions for par-ents can be less amorphous (for example, “Talk to your kids more”) andmore specific (for example, “Use rare words when you eat dinner with yourkids”) to the operative factors in emergent literacy growth.

Making this move to a focus on developing written language knowl-edge will allow emergent literacy researchers to more carefully specify,measure, and confirm operative cognitive and linguistic factors that makelearning to read and write easy or more difficult for individual children.It will allow us to explain the differential effects that various types ofknowledge have on different stages of developing literacy abilities. Forexample, developing knowledge of print-related concepts such as letterand sound associations and sight word reading and spelling appear to havemore of an effect on learning to read at the early stages. Lexical and syn-tactical knowledge of written language, by contrast, does not show up asa predictor of beginning reading but appears to play a role in developingliteracy abilities with more complex text than is used with beginning readers—a stage of literacy development that occurs around third andfourth grades (Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin, 1990; Purcell-Gates, McIntyre,and Freppon, 1995).

Focusing on emerging written, and not oral, language knowledge willalso help emergent literacy researchers avoid confusion in their measuresand analyses. Confusion results when children’s language is evaluated in


mixed contexts, such as “telling” stories, “dictating” stories (to be written),“conversing” at the dinner table with families, “recalling” a story heard (oralor written?), and so on.

Finally, focusing on written language development provides us with afield for instructional, or interventionist, recommendations that avoid theintractable nature of language and culture. One of the conclusions manytake from the research tying children’s oral language ability to success atreading and writing in school is that the oral language home environmentsof whole groups of children need to change. However, the children whogrow up in these homes are for the most part poor and belong to culturaland racial minority groups. Language is firmly embedded in culture, andchange in language is inevitably tied to change in culture (Gee, 1989). Withprimary focus on written language, with its secondary discourse nature forall speakers, we see a clearer path that involves introducing the use of thevarious written language registers into the lives of children who have notexperienced these uses before. The activities that could do this are ones thatcan be included in instructional settings along with explicit teacher focuson the different qualities of these language registers as compared with “theway we talk” (Delpit, 1993).

Language is central to literacy, but this language is written. By acknowl-edging this, we can study the ways in which written features of languageaffect developing literacy abilities and can track the emergence of these abil-ities as related to different experiences with written registers. These insightscan then be applied to policy and practice in order to increase the prospectsof full literacy for many children.

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VICTORIA PURCELL-GATES is professor of education and language and literacy atMichigan State University.

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Emergent Literacy Is Emerging Knowledge of Written, Not Oral, Language